POS and Retail

New mobile wallets like the Merchant Customer Exchange's CurrentC may find themselves in conflict with other high-tech mobile apps that came to market sooner.

Most mobile wallets clearly favor one industry over another, with banks and retailers often pitted against each other in a battle over payment card fees. JPMorgan Chase just made a stunning move by conceding some of this ground to the benefit of the Merchant Customer Exchange.

Last week U.S. House Small Business Committee held the second part of a hearing entitled “The EMV Deadline and What it Means for Small Businesses,” which was supposed to address payment security in the United States.

Bluetooth beacons are gradually appearing in more stores, and some experts predict their use will grow more rapidly once the devices establish a strong link to payments and other vital retail systems.

Starbucks Corp. said JPMorgan Chase & Co. will process transactions previously handled by Square Inc. as the coffee company rolls out terminals that accept chip-based cards.

Target, by all accounts, the corporate face of retail data breach, is driving full force to use its complete embrace of EMV to bolster its tarnished image and put it in the vanguard of card fraud protection and data security. And it is targeting one of the biggest sticking points to EMV: user adoption.

The combination of location-based marketing and mobile wallets is relatively new territory for merchants and consumers, bringing these two parties so close together that they may start to overlap.

When Square created the market for mobile point of sale devices, Verifone got defensive. Today, with the rollout of its Engage platform, Verifone is going on the offense.

Addressing the desire of small merchants that want a straightforward way to sell online, Square and Ecwid are partnering to synchronize sales and inventory between the physical and digital worlds.

Independent sales organizations and sales agents are finding that offering merchant cash advances and small-business loans can provide a lucrative sideline. But as with any enterprise, entrepreneurs who are focusing on the upside of the business should also develop a keen understanding of the pitfalls that can accompany a foray into alternative finance.

European mobile point of sale company SumUp has brought its technology across the pond.

Stockholm-based Seamless is threading currency exchange into its QR code-based mobile payment platform SEQR.

October 1 marked the dawn of a new era in the U.S. payment card marketplace. While there are not yet rules from the card brands that demand all parties utilize EMV technology, the financial liability shift is a significant first step across a line in the sand that cannot be erased.

With the EMV liability shift having just passed, banks and merchants alike are scrambling to comply with the card network-imposed deadline.

One of the top lieutenants in Silicon Valley is leaving the side of one high-profile Internet executive in Marissa Mayer to join another, Jack Dorsey.

We used to be content just searching online for information on products, scanning the latest news or finding out what our friends and family were up to.

With its IPO out of the way, First Data is accelerating its focus on merchant technology, and that means luring the developers who are rapidly changing how people shop and pay.

Starbucks and Square, once the hottest couple of the payments world, are splitting up. But their relationship was never perfect; signs of trouble were obvious from the very start.

No wonder Jack Dorsey wants to keep running Square. Dorsey, the payment company's chief executive officer who also just took on the same role at Twitter, is the largest shareholder in Square by a wide margin, with 24.4 percent. The investment firm Khosla Ventures is the second-largest with 17.3 percent, according to Square's registration for an initial public offering filed Oct. 14.

As mobility has become embedded in the world’s cultures, issuers are feeling the heat to create their own mobile apps, but in an era of non-top data breaches and increasing identity theft, security fears abound.